If there’s one barometer for figuring out when CIG is going to release a major update, it’s holidays. The 3.24 “Cargo Empires” patch was released on Thursday, the week before a three-day Labor Day weekend. The good news is that this is a U.S. only holiday and CIG is located in the UK so while it seems the release is on-brand for Star Citizen, it’s really just a coincidence in this case…unless it’s not.

3.24 is a major update so the patch notes are significant. I’ve recounted a lot of what made it into this patch in my previous look at the public test universe but since many people don’t flock to the PTU the moment they get access, and because there’s some last minute changes before the content reaches the public universe, here’s a “state of the live game” as I have personally found it.

Persistent Hangars

This is being touted as the first step in player homes. While we still wake up in a random HABS unit at our last visited population center when we log in, hangars are now instanced and persist between sessions. The size of the hangar is keyed to the largest ship we own via pledge, with the option to expand our hangar to fit ships we buy in game coming some time later; this means that players with only an Aurora or Titan won’t be seeing a Reclaimer in their home hangar should they earn enough aUEC to purchase one in-game.

Persistent hangars allow us to place items anywhere we like. Whereas previous to this patch we could only fill and extract containers, equip weapons, armor, and clothing and throw them on the floor, now doing so in our home hangars means those items will stick around between sessions. Containers are a real boon as we can now extract inventory items to those containers and keep the handy as physical items (more or less). We can extract “loose” items like weapons, utilities, and even the long-held “hangar flair” and put them on tables or seats or on the floors. It’s rudimentary right now and is prone to Citizien-itis: weird, buggy behavior that makes you wonder if it’s worthwhile to do it at all.

Players always have access to their personal hangars. Players in parties have access to the personal hangars of other party members. Non-affiliated players are currently teleported back to the station before they can even set foot into your hangar uninvited, in case they sneak into an elevator as you’re heading to your own space. At one point, CIG turned off the armistice flag meaning you were free to shoot intruders and while we still get that notice while we are in the elevator, I like that other players are just whisked away; I am not always armed in my hangar.

My largest ship is a Reclaimer, an absolute unit of salvaging and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, currently in the game. As a result, I got assigned an “extra large hangar”. I don’t take the Reclaimer out much, and since every other ship I own is significantly smaller, I withdrew a Greycat PTV from inventory to keep near the elevators. As stupid and as lazy as it sounds, having this “golf cart” available to drive over to my sitting area, or to take myself and one other person to a ship on the tarmac saves a lot of time.

How’s it going?

Pretty well. Hangars still need to vend ships and allow us to land and store our vehicles, so they still do that. Now, though, the floor opens and an elevator rises and falls to transport the ship “to inventory” which can be slow and sometimes seems to open and close without reason. Even though hangars are instanced, the doors are not so when other players are landing in their hangar using “your” doors, the alarm sounds can be heard in all other hangars which occupy that “stack” of hangar instances and that can be very annoying. Also, we can’t leave ships sitting on the bay floor or else they are considered impounded when we next log in; only smaller ships which can be moved to the margins of the hangar can stick around, and that’s OK since those would be ground vehicles like the Greycat. One of my friends has his Nova Tank sitting in a sideline bay, which looks pretty cool.

Freight Elevators

As Star Citizen continues its relentless march towards physicalizing everything, what was once a UI displaying inventory “in the cloud” has partially shifted to “freight elevators”. Pretty much anything we have in stored inventory at a location can be moved from the “warehouse” to any hangar we have access to which means that if I want to get my warehouse items from a friend’s hangar, I can. This is how we get containers, furniture, and hangar flair into our hangars; it can be used to move smaller, individual items like weapons, utilities, armor, or clothing but sometimes those items in particular will not survive the journey.

The real use for freight elevators is for long-term storage, free-trading, and hauling missions. For example, if I have salvaged several ships, I can take the RMC and store it in my warehouse via the freight elevator. Whereas before I would have had to sell everything I had salvaged because the only long-term storage I had was on-board my Vulture, now I can stockpile commodities for more favorable prices or I can transfer them to another player’s ship who has more cargo space to haul the items to another port for sale. This is a huge QoL step because previously the only way to extend a salvage mission was to follow a Vulture in a cargo ship (Cutlass, C1 Spirit, MAX, or something similar) and transfer boxes in space and at that point it became difficult to manage the sale of the items because of whose ship the materials were on.

How’s it going?

Aside from losing smaller items, pretty good. Recently, though, some players were having issues getting mission cargo from the elevators at LEO stations. CIG released a few hotfixes last night (Friday) which may or may not have addressed this.

Item Kiosks

Whereas before we could open our local inventory anywhere in any station or city, now we have to access the same via ubiquitous item kiosks. This has been the most contentious update because the original design had us work with the kiosk screen, dragging items from the “warehouse” screen to a “drawer” screen. We would then stoop down to “open the drawer” and extract these items. This implementation made working with local inventory a two step process (maybe a three step process) and people hated it. CIG changed it to use the old inventory system even before they opened the PTU to all backers, meaning the complaints were all heard and never seen by the majority of people; I never got to experience the drawer so I can’t speak to it directly, but it sounded like CIG was trying to re-use the freight elevator paradigm for smaller, personal items, and people weren’t having it. Of course, the old UI is now more difficult for having access to it only through the item kiosks, but CIG is supposedly back at the drawing board for this system.

How it’s going

Obviously not very well if CIG had to roll back their original design and left us with a hybrid system. I’ve seen people on spectrum begging CIG to suck it up and ditch the “immersive simulation” for this, giving us a paper-doll on the screen where we can equip our gear and open containers like armor, backpacks, and crates in our warehouse inventory. I am starting to think some of these systems are getting dragged out in concept phase because CIG is trying to figure out how to “simulate immersion” and while I like the idea of a “sci-fi life simulator” even I would rather have working systems if it meant we could get them — and get them fixed — faster.

Hauling Missions

Not everyone wants to blow things up; in fact a lot of people would rather not. With the addition of freight elevators, CIG has introduced contracted hauling missions. These use the existing reputation system, meaning players must first complete a qualification mission to move a small SCU (Standard Container Unit) of cargo from one location to another. The boxes are provided to the player’s warehouse, and they can be retrieved via the freight elevator, loaded onto a ship with sufficient cargo space, and then unloaded to another freight elevator at the destination. After qualifying, additional missions grant more rep, and more rep means missions requiring the transfer of more SCU and potentially larger containers requiring larger ships.

It was explained in a Star Citizen Live video that these missions aren’t just busy work. They are designed in a logical way such that places which produce materials will need someone to ship those materials to a location which consumes those materials (although producing and consuming is currently hand-wavery). Eventually, players will be able to transport items which were “created” using those raw materials, instead of always moving boxes around the universe, but that’s for down-the-road. This will all be part and parallel to the much-anticipated “Quant(a)(um)” economic simulation.

Missions can take the form of one pickup and one drop-off, one pickup and multiple-drop off, multiple pick-up and one drop-off, or multiple pick-up and multiple-drop off.

How’s it going?

Hauling missions probably work the best out of all of the updates, assuming we can get the cargo in place. Aside from the previously mentioned issue getting crates to show in the freight elevator, sometimes boxes can glitch out and vanish (which is a long time Citizen-itis issue, same as with placing things like furniture) which would obviously ruin the mission. Missions are timed, but generously so: most of the simple missions I have taken gave me 5 hours or more to complete, and missions can be completed in parts if you don’t have a single ship that can take everything all at once. The good news is that when shared, multiple people can take cargo, so if you don’t have enough room, bring friends and split the difference.

One disappointing side-effect is that tractor beams got nerfed in power and speed. Now, the hand-held multitool has a max SCU size, after which we need the 20k aUEC rifle beam to move items. Both have had their ranges reduced so we have to be closer to the items we want to move, and moving the items themselves is slower. This has caused players to land in a bay in a way that their cargo access is as close to the freight elevator as possible without causing issues, and that’s kind of a hack. There was a hover-dolly available in the early PTU, but it had issues and was pulled. It has not yet been reinstated in the PU.

Other Stuff

There’s a new global event, blockade runner, which I haven’t participated in. The idea is that pirates (of course) have blockaded one of the LEO stations. Players need to find materials that the pirates have stolen, return to the station, and land to deliver the goods, all while fighting through the blockade.

There’s also a new racing ship available for pledge, the Aegis Sabre Peregrine. I don’t do racing, so I am ambivalent about this.

What Now?

At this point, I have ships for mining, ships for salvaging, and ships for cargo moving. Technically, all of those activities can use the updates made for 3.24 and these updates begin to merge these activities into a unified system of economics rather than the siloed experiences that the once were. The addition of hauling missions, specifically, offers a targeted use of the freight elevators and cargo ships, and I’d love to see mining and salvaging get their own supply-side missions some day as well. Being able to store the fruits of these labors is great, but being able to transfer them to other players en masse is even better for group operations and ease.

3.24 is the “last stop for food and gas” sign before two major events: CitizenCon and the release of 4.0. There’s no way that this patch would not have been released before October when the convention is held because CIG has always been about 4.0 and having had the 3.24 patch sitting on the PTU would have meant they’d have to address its delay at CitizenCon. Now CIG can talk all day about 4.0 without having to detour into anything else.

CitizenCon will undoubtedly be all about 4.0, all the time, which means that while I’m obviously interested in the event, I will be lending only half-an-ear, maybe three-quarters of an ear. Pyro itself doesn’t offer me anything I’m interested in, although like all PvP-focused games the developers are going to try like hell to dangle things in front of people like me to get me interested. Want rarer materials to mine? Pyro. Want more lucrative shipping contracts (with hazard pay)? Pyro. Want to find rare and more powerful ship components? Only in Pyro. All of these buck conventional wisdom that the UEE would lock down more valuable minerals, reputable companies wouldn’t do business with pirates, and component manufacturers wouldn’t allow their best products to be limited to illegal markets, but this is video game logic, not real-world logic. CIG wants the bulk of player interaction to be through trading gunfire, and they will do whatever PvP games traditionally do herd players in that direction whether they want to be there or not.

4.0 and the ensuing point releases are supposedly also bringing things like fire (uh…yay?) and the engineering system. Somewhere in there should be the other things that were promised during last year’s CitizenCon, and I’m specifically talking about actual, real homes for players out in the universe. For that, we’re going to need more game systems, land claims, and ships like the Pioneer and whatever other as-of-yet-unannounced building construction pledge packages I’m sure they have on the drawing boards.